Natives are not a trend we are riding. They are what this country does best — so I design for the Australian flower, not around it.
Every few years someone announces that Australian natives are back, as if they had been away. They were never away. A waratah does not care about a trend cycle. It has been doing exactly this — all architecture and attitude — for a very long time, and the only thing that changes is whether we are paying attention.
I wrote recently that I only ever use one foliage, because I want the flower to be the thing you look at. Natives make that easy, because a single banksia or king protea already is the thing you look at. You do not dress it. You give it room. A pin cushion does not need a supporting cast; it needs a designer with the confidence to leave the space around it alone.
This is where the fashion brain helps. Natives are about silhouette and texture before they are about colour — the felt of a protea, the spike of a banksia, the dusty grey-green of eucalyptus that I would not swap for anything imported. You compose them the way you would cut a strong coat: one decisive shape, held, with nothing fighting it.
Here is the part that should bother us more than it does. A single Australian native stem can sell overseas for many times what we pay for it at home, and Israel exports more of our wildflowers than we grow ourselves. We treat as roadside what the rest of the world flies across the planet to put on a table. That is not a supply problem. It is a taste problem, and taste is the part I take personally.
We treat as roadside what the rest of the world flies across the planet to put on a table.
So when I build with natives, I am not nodding to a trend or doing a patriotic turn. I am designing for the flower that grows where I live, in the season it actually grows, composed so it looks gathered rather than manufactured. Considered beats abundant, and natives reward restraint better than almost anything else in the bucket.
Natives, designed not dispatched.
The Broome — banksia, straw flowers and eucalyptus, composed and held. From $127. Shop the Broome →
Send something that could only have come from here. The same restraint I bring to everything else, pointed at the flowers this country does better than anyone.
